Dry Ice Extraction Method: A Step-by-Step Guide

One of the easiest and best methods for extracting kief right in your home is the Dry Ice Extraction Method. When you start taking extraordinary efforts to harvest kief you’ve graduated to a whole new level of pot expertise.

What is kief?

Kief is the beautiful powdery stuff that comes off of bud, and it’s what contains the bulk of the nug’s THC.

That means that if you can somehow isolate kief and find a way to smoke it or turn it into some other usable product, you can get some seriously killer highs.

Materials needed for dry ice extraction method:

Two 1 gallon “bubble bags” (get one 73 micron bag and one 90 micron bag. Here’s the brand name bubble bag, and here’s the generic version.)

Step 1: Crush the dry ice

Begin by setting your block of dry ice in the sink and carefully—with gloves and goggles on—use the hammer to break it up into 1-inch chunks.

Step 2: Put weed in bucket

Not too complicated. Just put your weed into the 1-gallon bucket.

Step 3: Add dry ice to bucket

Now carefully add the chunks of dry ice to the bucket full of weed. Gently shake the bucket to toss together the weed and dry ice.

Step 4: Let it cool

Now let the bucket of ice and marijuana sit for a few minutes. You want to give everything a chance to get nice and cold.

Step 5: Slip on the bubble bag

While the weed and dry ice are resting, carefully pull the 73-micron bubble bag down over the top of the bucket.

Once the bag has been pulled down so that it’s completely covering the bucket, shake the entire thing for another couple minutes. Now everything’s had a chance to get fully chilled, and you’re just about ready to sift out that killer kief.

Step 6: Sift out your kief

Holding the bucket over a clean, flat surface, turn it upside down and shake the bucket. The bubble bag now acts as a sieve, and you’re basically just sifting out all the fine-grain kief onto the flat surface while all the plant matter stays behind.

Once there’s no more kief falling out of the bubble bag, set it to the side and use a credit card to collect all the kief that fell out into a single mound.

Store your kief in a secure container.

Since you started with the bubble bag that has smaller openings, the kief you’ll collect on this first pass will be the highest quality, purest kief with the highest levels of THC. Be sure you gather up every last grain of this precious dust.

Step 7: Do the same thing with 90-micron bag

After you’ve collected all the purest kief, remove the 73-micron bubble bag, replace it with the 90-micron bubble bag, and repeat the entire process.

Since this bag has slightly larger holes, you’ll be sifting out larger grains of kief that contain slightly more plant matter than the kief you got from your first sift. But don’t worry, this is still good sh*t.

Step 8: Enjoy your mini mountains of kief

The kief you’ve just extracted using the dry ice extraction method is super potent and will give you intense highs. You can smoke it, press it into hash, use it to make moon rocks, and all sorts of other things. It’s time to experiment, explore, and enjoy!

Nick is a Green Rush Daily staff writer from Fort Collins, Colorado. He has been at the epicenter of the cannabis boom from the beginning. He holds a Masters in English Literature and a Ph.D. in cannabis (figuratively of course).